Fifty Cents and a Dream

Gr 2-4–Here sits a barefooted boy leaning against a tree trunk, eyes closed, dreaming about reading. Here he is following his master’s daughter to school, carrying her books, feeling their “magic seeping into his hands.” Booker was born a slave, and slaves were forbidden to read. Emancipation came while he was still young. He worked with the men in his family, first shoveling salt, then in a coal mine. He learned to read from a spelling book his mother gave him. He attended the school for Negroes after work and dreamed of Hampton Institute, where he could study writing. He walked there–hundreds of miles through the mountains of Virginia, unloading ships in Richmond when his food money ran out. A janitor job at Hampton paid his room and board. Written in simply stated narrative, in a font that looks hand-printed, this story covers more of Washington’s life and offers more detail than Marie Bradby’s More Than Anything Else (Orchard, 1995),  a brief, movingly told, beautifully rendered introduction to Washington for younger children. Collier’s patterned and textured watercolor and paper collage paintings perfectly mirror the narrative, reiterating details and settings in handsomely constructed glimpses of the young Booker at school and at work; the teen-aged Booker traveling on foot toward a better education; the student dreaming of great things to come. His dreams are shown as luminescent bubbles or rays of light that reach toward the sky; his shirt is map-patterned. Two pages of biographical endnotes include a time line of his significant accomplishments. An inspirational life, memorably presented.–Susan Scheps, formerly at Shaker Public Library, OH